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Trust me Slinky, few are more risk-averse than I am. As for "Life-inertia" (great term BTW) I have been married for 21 years, working at my current position for 8 years, have a kid about to go into college and one 4 years behind her (8 consecutive years of college payments), and now two mortgages. Safe to say, I got baggage.

The key is to mitigate the risk, and it is not as harebrained, or difficult as you might think.

If you are happy with where you are in life, then I congratulate you; the thing is, I am not, at least not as far as my career aspirations are concerned. I hate management, love to get my hands dirty and actually DO the work. This has basically limited my opportunity for advancement. Plus I am reaching the end of my shelf life in a profession (Technology) that looks for a younger, cheaper labor force.

Here is the thing, ever since I started my endeavor, I have never been in better shape mentally or physically. The challenges are there, don't get me wrong, but the rewards so far have been worth it. (I went from a 236 lb couch potato in April, to a guy about to run a 10k on Labor Day).

I am still at my job, but I am laying a foundation for my transition. By leveraging technology, it is easy to test the waters with minimal investment of time and money. Just jumping ship at this point is crazy.

Oh, and I will survive...regardless of whether the blog succeeds or fails ;o)

Take care,

Zen
ProjectNomad

@Richardk, Thanks Richard, and likewise, this is an interesting forum, I'm going to explore it more.

Yeah, "the magic age"...yet I see more and more stories like this, which seem to present opportunity - age as a asset rather than a liability. Hey if all else fails, become a consultant .

@ArnoldW2, Just out of idle curiosity, how did you come across my blog? Was it the backlink from the Business Week article?

No worries...I was kinda hoping for the shock effect - "How the heck did he find this?" Followed by "Whoa...he actually responded!". My philosophy - If you can't take the least amount of criticism, don't blog. I have thick skin.

Besides, your criticism is valid...I started the blog as an experiment and it is still evolving.

I am in stealth mode because I am still gainfully employed and it allows me the freedom to criticize the sometimes Dilbertian decisions my company makes from time to time (should I choose to). I consider it an additional level of risk mitigation

1) Yes, the latter. I am from the school of Multiple Streams of Income (preferably passive) - Rents, Royalties, Affiliation, and products that can be drop shipped from the manufacturer while outsourcing the mundane day to day stuff. All along this trip I am retooling and learning XHTL, CSS, jQuery, and general web design (coming from a heavy Telephony with C++ and Java background). This presents a problem because the blog does have the potential to go all over the place (ok...does go all over the place). The other problem is, I am still making early forays into each of these topics so I don't have enough of my own content yet. Thus I look for things that I think are relevant and point to them - admittedly lame, but there is a lot of cool information that I think is relevant to people who want to try and go out on their own. I just need to do a better of organizing and presenting the information.

2) Yeah...here's the thing, I'm about as middle of the road, plain vanilla as they come. I have a hard time expressing my opinion about anything (much to my wife's frustration sometimes). This is not for lack of passion, just the way I am I guess. I will work on this (in fact, check out the entry I made earlier this evening in response to something Slinky said - it was what I consider a passionate entry). I will give more of my opinion/support information on the external content to which I link.

Thanks for the response.

Zen
ProjectNomad